Improvements in data communications technology have significantly affected the financial services industry. Coupled with the Internet, deregulation, and globalization of financial services, these improvements have enabled traders to participate in financial markets from virtually anywhere in the world. Technological improvements have also enabled various service providers to provide services to these traders, such as stock quotations, customized trading platforms, and automatic execution of trades based on trading models.
However, several problems exist despite these technological improvements. Providers of trading services generally create software programs for a variety of operating environments, such as MICROSOFT WINDOWS and APPLE MAC OS. Targeting software development efforts at multiple operating environments often requires duplicated development efforts, and so may be inefficient and expensive. Various operating environments or trading platforms may have different software languages with which developers may need to become familiar, thereby further increasing costs or delaying schedules. Even when the same programming language is used in different operating environments, the build environment for each may be substantially different. Some trading platforms may use network protocols that do not traverse network devices, such as firewalls or other security devices. When a cross-platform development tool that enables a software developer to target multiple operating environments changes its application program interface (API), an updated version of a run-time environment corresponding to the tool may need to be provided to all users. Moreover, when an application targets multiple operating environments and needs to be changed due to a bug fix or a business requirement change, subsequent programming, testing, building and distributing for each target platform may be an expensive task. A user may have different authentication credentials with each of several service providers that the user is receiving services from. Integrating services from these multiple service providers into a common trading application may require users to key in multiple credentials (i.e., one for each service provider). Thus, a system that solves these problems would have significant utility.